


say you mean it, seal it up

by roachpatrol



Series: Sleepsong [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abusive Relationships, F/M, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-12 06:37:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1183049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Daevit Stride, at your service,” he drawls. “Y’know, while we’re being so very courteous and polite in the course of these here introductions.” He kicks a foot up at you and you can see the cholerbear trap clamped around his leg, teeth sunk in through sneaker and jeans all the way to flesh. There’s a glint in the ragged depths of the shredded denim that you really, really hope isn’t bone. “Lend a hand, buddy?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	say you mean it, seal it up

_Weight is coming off_  
 _Soaring high_  
 _Pleading you to stay_  
 _Come alive_

*

 

The Great Lower Than The Great Mid South Continent Plains But Still Higher Than The Lower South Continent Plains Plains are beautiful in the moonlight. They also have jack shit in the way of wi-fi connection, your matesprit is up to her curly horns in mud and potsherds, and you are bored as fuck. 

“I’m gonna go for a walk,” you say.

“Mhm,” Aradia says. 

“I might die,” you say.

“Mhm,” Aradia says. 

“You’re not getting any of my stuff if I die,” you say. 

“Your stuff is crap and I will set it on fire for the good of trollkind should I inherit,” she says. “Look, this hoofbeast has a bulge for a head.”

You lean over the pit and inspect the dirty shard of shell being waved at you. Yep, that is definitely a hoofbeast with a bulge for the head. 

“Does that go in the genital-drawing pile or the animal-drawing pile?” you ask. 

“I might need to make a third pile!” she says, admiring the stupid thing. “This is so fucking exciting.”

“I’m going for a walk,” you repeat, and trudge off. 

You lose sight of the dig site pretty much immediately in the long grass, but since you can just fly back this doesn’t really matter. It’s still boring out here, but it feels good to be moving, putting one foot in front of the other while grass sways and hisses above your horns. You can see stars and bright clouds scudding by overhead between the lattice of seedpods and spiderwebs. It’s actually a really gorgeous night. If only you’d fucking thought to bring a better infonet hookup, you might be able to stretch out and make something of it. 

“Hey,” a guy says from somewhere in the grass, and you pretty much jump out of your skin. “You a psionic?”

“What? Who? Fuck you!” you say. “I’ll fry your fucking eyes out. Who’s there?”

“Yeah, hi,” the guy says. “Nice to meet you too, man. Charmed as hell.”

You push cautiously through the stalks towards the voice, and find another rustblood reclined casually on ass and elbows in the middle of a circular trampled clearing. He looks younger than you or Aradia, reedy and unfinished, though it could just be the way his oversized horns and angular douchebag shades give him a kind of desperate, tryhard air. He gives you an ostentatiously casual little horntoss, a twinkle of bloody fingers.

There’s... wow. There’s a lot of blood. 

“The fuck happened to you?” you ask, horrified. “You look like you got your ass served up like roast beast, _shit._ ”

“Daevit Stride, at your service,” he drawls. “Y’know, while we’re being so very courteous and polite in the course of these here introductions.” He kicks a foot up at you and you can see the cholerbear trap clamped around his leg, teeth sunk in through sneaker and jeans all the way to flesh. There’s a glint in the ragged depths of the shredded denim that you really, really hope isn’t bone. “Lend a hand, buddy?”

Well, fuck. It’s not like you can turn around and leave him like this, now that you know his name... “Sollux Captor,” you introduce yourself, and approach cautiously. The trampled circle is apparently the limits of his reach, and it’s scattered with bits of broken sword. More than one sword. Which also explains those bad slices all over his palms and arms, and the slate pallor under the ruddy smears. You’re kind of impressed with his chill, however forced it might be: you’d be screaming royal murder and setting shit on fire at this point.

You hunker down and trace your fingers across the device. You’ve never had any cause to use a thing like this, but it makes a certain amount of mechanical sense. Hinges here, a pressure plate there, springs. A long length of chain pinning the thing into the ground. You hope the rust-orange patches all over the metal are just dried blood, or this kid is a big sloppy pile of dead meat walking. You examine where the trap’s teeth sink into his flesh, the dark dribbles of blood that seep out around the punctures. There’s a hard tremble in his shin, for all that he’s obviously trying to hold still, and it rattles up through your fingertips. 

“Come on, just get it off,” he snaps, finally showing a little impatience. “We don’t have to make a whole tender date of it, Cassanova, quick and dirty’ll do. I got some places to be and a meadow in Fucknowhere Bullshitsville is not one of them.”

“I pull these teeth out and you’re gonna start spurting like a stomped ketchup packet,” you say. “You won’t be going anywhere but Decomposition Central. Look, my matesprit’s got a hive not too far from here, I can get you patched up a lot better there than out in the middle of this grassy shitheap. How’s that sound?”

He stares at you for a long while, long enough that you almost say _fuck it_ and leave him here to fester. 

“Cool,” he says, finally, quietly. His leg rattles under your fingertips. 

“Cool,” you echo, and sever the chain with your psionics. 

He’s not pleased when you scoop him up into the air, if the sudden death-grip on your shoulder is any indication, but he handles himself pretty well. You do your best to support his fucked up leg so it doesn’t go swinging and dangling around in every crossbreeze, and it doesn’t take too much time to get back to Aradia’s dig site. 

“Hey, AA,” you call down.

“Hay is for hoofbeasts,” she calls back.

“Bulgeheaded hoofbeasts or regular?” you ask. 

“You’re the brains of this operation, you tell me!” she calls. “What’s up, why are you in my grill again, I thought you were off communing with nature like someone with all their funglands excised.”

“I found a guy. I’m gonna use your facilities, okay?”

At that she actually pops her head out of the hole. 

“Wow,” she says. “Is that a cholerbear trap?”

“It’s not exactly the latest in stylish footware, ma’am,” your new buddy drawls. His hand on your shoulder doesn’t feel dissimilar to a trap itself. He’s got the shakes real bad, and you’re increasingly concerned. 

“Did you know someone’s setting these up on your property?” you ask. 

She frowns. “No, and I don’t know why they would be, the cholerbear migration isn’t for another two seasons. Any poacher’d know that.”

“Ain’t poachers,” Daevit says. “Don’t worry. It’s just a dumb joke my friend left for me.”

“Some friend,” you snort. 

He smiles, wanly. “Yup,” he says. “Now, if you’d be so gracious as to grant a humble motherfucker access to your nearest source of running water and shit? Sparky here wants to pay some extra special attention to my holes.”

“Then what are you standing around flapping your faces at me for?” Aradia says, and you love her a little more. “My hive’s your hive, go on. Get him patched, sweetie.”

You give her an embarrassingly soppy grin and take off again. 

“Whipped,” Daevit says. 

“I will drop you,” you say.

“Charmingly devoted, I mean. It’s touching. Really. I may cry. Are we there yet? Because I don’t know about you but I had a big night planned and this was not exactly on my schedule, I didn’t wake up and pencil in _get exotic new piercing_ to my agenda—”

He keeps up a stream of hoarse, idiotic chatter all the way into Aradia’s hive, up the stairs, and onto the ablution chamber’s counter. You let him keep going—his voice pitching higher with nerves—while you fetch out the medical kit and lay out disinfectant and dermal tape like you have two hundred times before for your matesprit’s various scrapes and fractures, and then you yank the beartrap’s teeth open and apart in one quick and careful burst of psi.

“FUCK!” the kid yowls, and punches you in the neck. You didn’t even see his arm move, and you’d just _assumed_ he didn’t have powers—you go horns over heels across the ablution chamber’s floor, almost too startled to hurt. No, wait. You hurt a lot. 

“Shit,” you slur, wheezing for air. “Ow...”

“Fuck,” he whimpers, and you can see he’s clutching his leg, at the rusty red-orange blood welling up fast. “Oh fuck, oh. Oh god, bro, it’s getting everywhere, oh god, no, no, fuck—”

“No, don’t worry about it, I’m fine,” you rasp, irritated, and lever yourself back up to your feet. Ugh, you’re gonna be bruised down to your fucking bilesack, _ow_. Meanwhile, Daevit’s busily flipping his shit, babbling nonsense and flapping his claws around uselessly. 

“Stop,” you say, grabbing for his bloodslick hands. The smell’s starting to make you sick, sharp blood and flopsweat. “Fuck, stop it, kid, you’re going to blow a fuse. Settle down.”

He makes a terrible ratchety whine, and buries his face abruptly in your chest. Well, then. 

“Uh,” you say, and you can feel your traitor face start to burn. You pat his back a little. “Yeah, okay. You good?”

He nods silently. One of his hands is tight over his mouth. 

“Right. Sit back. AA’s always getting her over-adventurous posterior anatomy shredded to hell and back, so I’m a pro at patching ornery rustbloods back together, okay? We’ll have you back on both feet in a snap.”

He nods again, still silent and you ease him out of his tight huddle. His leg’s still merrily burbling away like a busted faucet, and is incredibly gross and messy. He is going to need some serious fluids and ‘cupe time after this...you try not to think about tucking him into the slime yourself, or how he might look slicked-down and sleepy. He’s a big boy, he can get back to wherever he came from just fine on his own. 

The soggy pantsleg gets rolled up to his soggy bony knee, and the sock and sneaker get tossed into the waste disposal cylinder. He screams through his fingers at the burn of disinfectant when you pour it across his leg, practically convulsing in place, but at least he doesn’t punch you again. Your neck aches: tomorrow night is not going to be fun. Then again, at least you don’t have a surplus hole problem. You pat his shoulder as professionally as you can to keep him steady as you wait for the disinfectant to fizzle out. Once it’s done its thing and the bloodflow’s clotting up nicely, you wrap a pretty gratuitous amount of dermal regeneration adhesive all over him from knee to toes, then up both sliced-up arms. It’s not like you haven’t procured several fucking rafts of the stuff for Aradia, who likes to pretend spit and strips of clothing are adequate medical treatment for getting up close and personal with rockslides. 

“There,” you say, and hover-hands over him awkwardly, unsure about propriety now that he’s no longer critically fucked up. “All done, man.”

“Okay,” he says roughly, “thanks, I’ll just—bounce—” and goes to slide off the counter. He hits the floor on his good leg but makes a terrible pained squeak and crumples anyway. 

You catch his shoulders just before he faceplants, and your guts turn over in panic to feel him panting and shaking. From the side you can see his eyes behind the big shades, and they’re wide and glazed and terrified. 

“Let’s get some juice into you,” you say. “You’re not going anywhere for a while.”

“No, no, ‘m fine,” he says. “Tip-fuckin’-top. Places to do. Things to, to stuff. See. Open road is calling my name, sending out a perfumed invitation and all, lacy cardstock and silver, writing, you can’t turn down a classy dame like that, ‘s’rude—”

“So is being a shit guest,” you snap, impatient. “You fucking hosed down my girlfriend’s bathroom, jerkass, now shut up and let me feed you something.”

He whimpers, and sags floppily when you haul him up under your arm. Except for his ridiculous horns he weighs hardly a thing, and you kind of wonder if he’s gotten augmentations bolted on or something. You know you’re not exactly seeing him at his best right now but he looks like he hardly has the physical resources for a full set of fangs, let alone a rack that makes Aradia’s own set look modest. 

You realize you’re ogling a fucked-up kids’ headgear while he’s kitten-limp and you’re trollhandling him down the stairs, like a total creep, and snap your gaze frontwards. You trollhandle him to the nutrition block a little faster. 

Daevit’s gotten outside of two juice boxes and a thick slice of grubloaf and is looking a lot less miserable when there’s a brisk knock on the front portal. 

“Who—?” you ask, because you can’t think of why Aradia would knock on her own door, even as a goofy joke, and then you notice that the kid’s frozen up, gone slate-gray and tiny as a pinch of grass stalks. His eyes behind the shades are so wide the yellows show clear around their grub-gray irises. 

“That your _friend_?” you ask grimly. His nod is such a tight, minute gesture it hardly stirs his horntips. His fingers dig into the third juicebox hard enough that juice is dribbling out around the clawholes. 

“He’s my bro,” he says, in a weird flat voice. “He’s. We play games. Together.” He lets out a terrible croaky laugh. “I thought I’d last longer this time.”

Something inside your chest compacts down tight and white-hot and furious. You don’t hear Daevit’s voice among the itchy clamor at the back of your pan, and you think you’re going to keep it like that. 

“Right,” you say. “I’m going to go tell him you’re not in.”

Even through the shades, you can see him radiate an embarrassingly fervid gratitude. You wave it away and stomp off to the front portal just as it’s knocked on again. 

“What the hell do you think you’re—” _shit,_ he’s big, “trying to pull here, chumplord?” you demand, maybe more squeakily than you’d like. The troll on the front stoop is tall enough you have to look _up_ , and solid as hell across the shoulders. He looks down at you, flares his fins, and he’s got the same tryhard angular shades as Daevit. On him they’re actually intimidating. 

“I think you have somethin’ of mine,” he says, smoothly, politely, and has the fucking gall to lean an elbow against the doorframe. “Would you be so fuckin’ kind, random jackass in my way right now, as to allow me to retrieve that somethin’?”

“Like hell,” you snarl. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Hell is most definitely a thing that pertains to what it’s goin’ to be like for you if you don’t.” His fins stretch, flex, relax. “I can smell him, landdweller. Back your shit up.”

You take your glasses off. He looks at your gathering, crackling power with no more than polite interest sketched across his regal, fine-boned asshole face. 

“If you don’t start shit,” he says quietly, “won’t _be_ shit, kid.”

You hit him with an optic blast set to globeshitting crazy rage-explosion, and he—holy shit, he’s got a rocketboard out, he rides the blastwave off and around the front field in a truly impressive, scary corkscrew, spinning off vast crackling arcs of your psi like he’s surfing nothing more dangerous than a splash of hydrogen dioxide. When he comes looping back around he’s got some kind of sword out and he’s holding it loose and ready. Your second optic blast hits that sword and _shears_ , peels off to either side in waves, and he sails through like you’re nothing. 

You want more than anything to tear off across the sizzling grass and into the sky, get some height, assess your options since he’s coming in so _fast_ but if you clear the front portal there’s not going to be anything to stop the shitbag from plowing right through Aradia’s hive like it’s so much moldy tissue. You’re no fan of siege maneuvers but like hell are you going to budge. You fumble out a double handful of ornamental throwing stars from your dusty unused strife deck, and you whip them towards him fast enough they trail sonic booms. 

He dodges most, cuts the rest in midflight like a flash bastard but you should have _expected_ flash from fucking royalty, you’re never going to be able to match him in weapons combat. All you have is your psi, and you can feel it starting to sizzle inside you as throw everything you have at him and it doesn’t do shit but glitter off his blade. On a desperate gamble you wrench the shrapnel from the throwing stars and cram it all up and into the narrow intake vents of the rocketboard.

They’re shielded, but they’re not shielded against hot pointy metal debris. The board coughs, screams, and flips the seadweller face-first into the wall right next to the front portal at an approximately insane speed. You can feel the wet _crunch_ of impact in your horns. The board thrashes up into the night sky and explodes. 

The heap of seadweller grunts, twitches, and unfolds back upright. Despite yourself you take a step back. One of his fins hangs from the side of his head like a broken fan and when he snarls there’s dark blood tinting his fangs. 

“Right,” he says. “Enough playin’.”

When he raises his hand you take another step back, touching your hands to your temples past the pounding strain to go for another optic blast—

and then it hurts, hurts more, worse, differently. You feel like you’re being turned inside out, peeled somehow, like he’s reached right past your flesh and has his cold claws around your very center, the most tender private pulsing core of who you are, he’s got his fingers sunk in and he’s _twisting_. The voices of the doomed rise up all around you, thunderously loud and close. It’s as if you’re getting dragged out to wherever they come from, the cold and the crushing dark, the nothingness—squeezed right out of yourself, and you’re screaming. 

What’s one more doomed soul crying out among all the rest? 

Nothing, no one. 

The pressure lasts for an endlessly crushing age, tearing at you, rendering you smaller and smaller, spreading you out against the darkness—and then fades. You hiccup, take a breath, and realize vaguely that you’re sprawled like a broken doll across the threshold of the doorway, your eyes burning with tears and your mouth burning with bile. Every part of you hurts. 

Daevit is attached to the seadweller’s front like a remora, pulling at his face and babbling, “Shh, bro, easy, come on, shh, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I won’t run away again, I promise, never, we’ll just go back home and be happy we really will this time I’ll be good, you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to do anything, shh, shh, please don’t, please.” They keep flickering, unbelievably fast, the seadweller continuously peeling his moirail off him and the kid climbing back on, pleading with him desperately for your life. 

You make an awful croak, and manage to rock halfassedly from one side to the other. You drool on yourself. Good job, Captor. Some dashing hero _you_ make. Trying to fry the seadweller’s head off while his guard’s down yields a pathetic sizzle around your horns and a round of terrible, wracking dry-heaves. 

“We’ll just go,” Daevit says, tugging on his boyfriend’s hand, and when he backs off a little ways he’s still _limping_. The fingers he smears across the seadweller’s noble, sculpted cheeks are stark-white with dermal tape. He whines, pitifully, “Bro, dude, I’m sorry, I really am, so we’ll just go, can’t we just go? I wanna go home, bro.”

You hiss, weakly, and two sets of shades fix on you. 

“He’s done,” Daevit says. “He just doesn’t know it, okay? You got him, he’s out—”

“Only one way to make sure,” the seadweller says, and raises a hand up to you again. No, no no, god, anything but that terrible nothingness again, that vast sundering—as you cringe helplessly back Daevit plasters himself across the seadweller like he’s auditioning for the really filthy kind of porn, trying to distract him, to save your sorry useless hide, and it cuts you up worse to see the kid like that than the torture had. 

You manage to tilt your chin up in a spastic jerk, and you snarl defiance at the seadweller. Daevit’s face goes terribly blank. He turns away, and cold fingers start to burn once more towards your heart.

“What the _fuck_ are you doing to my boyfriend?” Aradia snaps, storming up from the long grass. The pressure inside you eases again and you watch, dazed and delighted, as she cocks a muddy fist back and punches the seadweller hard in his ruined fin. He yowls, Daevit scrambles away, and that impossible psi-splitting sword comes up. Aradia swings her other fist and she’s got her whip—you’re never going to argue with her about strifekind again, she’s beautiful and perfect and whipkind is your new favorite weapon in the whole entire universe—she snaps the sword out of the seadweller’s hand and sends it spinning into the long grass. 

Then her eyes blaze with silver light, and the ambient temperature plummets. All the shadows writhe and twist, tortured by her power into awful coiling shapes, and you can see—in the depths of the light pouring out of her skull, you can see the dead, silent and screaming, merciless. And they all pour towards the seadweller. 

He howls. It’s a beautiful sound, long and throaty, terribly pained. 

“Kid,” Aradia says calmly, kindly, “You. What’s-your-face.”

“Daevit,” the kid says, huddling into himself. “Uh. Ma’am.”

“Would you like to kill him?” she asks. “He’s killed so many people. He’d deserve it.”

“No!” Daevit says. “God, fuck no. He’s my—he’s my brother. He saved me.”

She just looks at him. “And is he done, saving you?”

Daevit watches the seadweller for a long time, watches him squirm and scream on the grass, and Aradia quietly floats, serene. The highblood looks younger, reduced to the sum of his guilt and his shame like that, and Daevit, standing in judgement, looks a lot older. It’s a look you like on both of them. 

“Yeah,” Daevit says, finally. “Yeah, we’re done. I’ll tell him. I’ll make him go away. No one has to die here, please.”

“That sounds nice,” she says, and the brilliant deathly light fades from her eyes. The seadweller gasps for breath and she kicks his shoulder, hard. “Did you get that, highblood?”

He sits up, painfully, and looks around. He looks at Daevit, and now there’s something horrible in the way he looks, now you hate it, that unguarded, ugly pain.

“So,” he hisses, “the first pair of lowbloods to put a scratch on me in front of you gets you so wet you’d turn your back on everythin’ I’ve ever done for you? You really think you want to live out here in the dirt with all the common rabble, bro? Holding hands and singin’ shitblood solidarity for the eyeblink that comprises your sorry little life, that’ll really help you out, won’t it, that’ll really make you a big fuckin’ man—”

“Shut up!” the kid screams, bravely, and he raises his chin up even though it trembles. “Shut up, would you just shut _up_!”

A tight, hideous silence, then: “I love you, kid,” the seadweller says. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” Daevit says, shaking like a leaf, and wipes at his nose. “I just don’t think it actually matters anymore, okay? We’re _over_ , man. I want out. I’ve wanted out for a long fuckin’ time.”

“Oh,” the seadweller says. He sits up, painfully, and just stares. “...oh.”

He levers himself up to his feet and Daevit backs away, his bad leg almost buckling on him as he goes. You ache to prop him up but you’re still sprawled out, uselessly limp and lost in your own unresponsive body. You manage to kick your legs a bit. 

“If we’re over,” the seadweller says, turning the words around in his mouth, “if we’re over, li’l man, fine, we’re over. You just had to say. But after I walk out of here I’m not taking you back, okay, when you realize what kind of mistake you made, throwin’ away everything I’ve offered you—”

“Okay,” Daevit says. “Yeah. Deal.”

“Okay,” the seadweller repeats. He looks gutted, and you hate him for it. 

Aradia’s lights flicker a bit and she takes a deliberate step forward and to the side, shielding you and Daevit pretty obviously. “Now,” she says kindly, gently, “is the part where you _do_ walk out of here, and you never bother Daevit again, or so help me I will haunt your chilly purple butt inside _out_ , don’t you think I won’t.”

The crossfire between their glares could crisp a guy. The seadweller pulls himself up to his feet and there’s a hot, fraught moment where you all just stare at each other. Then he shrugs, dusts his shirt off like he couldn’t give less of a fuck, and strolls away into the long grass. 

“Remind me never to tick you off,” Daevit says faintly. 

“Oh, don’t worry,” Aradia smiles. “Sollux can keep you informed.”

You mean to laugh, at that, but it comes out as a pained gurgle. You feel like your insides got scrunched up and dumped back into your outsides the wrong way around, and attempting to kick your legs again results in an increasingly panicked wriggle. With the seadweller in retreat you can concentrate on what the fuck is wrong with you, but with the seadweller in retreat you now don’t have anything else to concentrate on but _how much is fucking wrong with you_. You gurgle again, trying to curse, and spray sparks. 

Aradia’s knees hit the ground beside your face, and she pulls you into her arms. 

“Sollux,” she’s saying, worried, and at least your fucked-up psionic discharge can’t hurt her, at least she can ground you. “Sollux, sweetie, what the hell—”

“He’ll be okay,” the kid says, from somewhere over your shoulder. “I’m sorry, fuck, it’s not a permanent thing, my bro wouldn’t have totally destroyed him—”

“Wouldn’t he?” Aradia snaps. Daevit cringes back. 

“I’m sorry,” he mutters. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m a primetime fuckup who can’t tell his ass from the nearest heap of trash but I swear I didn’t fucking plan to get your boyfriend fried up like a medium rare meatshield, okay, a thousand goddamn apologies—”

“Thh,” you manage, and succeed in hitching around in Aradia’s grip. You catch one of Daevit’s mangled fingers, and hang on. “Thhshh.” As the meatshield in question, you think maybe you should get some input on what he has to apologize for, which is nothing. 

Daevit hiccups, wipes his nose, glances nervously at Aradia. “Um,” he says. “So. Yeah. I could, um. I could go? I could just go.”

You cling tighter: you have exactly half a working set of grasp noodles and you are not letting this asshole out of your sight until you can actually manage to stand up on your own. Aradia looks at your hand, and then the kid, and then sighs and gives you a big squeeze. 

“No way,” she says. “We just went through a lot of trouble to keep you. You’re staying!”

“Oh,” Daevit says. He looks pleased, and his cheeks are suspiciously ruddy. “...cool.”

He helps Aradia get you upright and indoors, and to everyone’s relief, by the time you get to the nutrition block you’re walking about as well as your new buddy: barely, but hey. That’s something. Also, at some point in your epic showdown you managed to piss yourself, which is a bold an exciting new development in the frontier of failure. Aradia peels Daevit off to sit the fuck down and have another juice box, and bundles you off to the ablution chamber. You stare blankly at the rusty spatters of blood and discarded gauze wrappers and feel intensely fucking dislocated. 

Holy shit, this whole debacle couldn’t have taken more than an hour or two. 

Holy shit, you almost _died_. You think maybe you were dead, for a little bit, there. You stare blankly into the mirror. Some half-dead kid with barf on his shirt and pee on his pants and blood still dripping slow out your nose stares back. Fuck, you’re hideous.

“Hey,” Aradia says. “...you alright?” 

“Bainthhk,” you rasp, and lurch for her, arms clumsily spread. She laughs, grabbing you when you overbalance, and pulls you under the spray. 

“Branf,” you try again, and then give up and bite her neck. She doesn’t shove you off, even though you think you’re probably digging your teeth in too hard, even though you’re soggy with water and worse. She just holds you. 

“That was pretty scary,” she says, and rubs her cheek against one of your horns. “Don’t go before I do, okay?” You try to say _sorry_ but you can’t, yet, but you can kind of get your arms around her waist, so. So there’s that. You hold each other for a long time, half in and half out of the spray. Then she kisses your horn, shoves you to your knees under the water, and starts taking off her shirt. After that you find other things to do with your mouth than try to say sorry. 

When you finally stumble out of the ablution trap, a little more coherent and a lot more worn out, you find Daevit perched at the top step of the stairs. He’s flushed bright all the way out to his eartips, and he’s reading the nutrition information on his juice box very intensely. 

“Pbfgh,” you say. 

He nearly jumps out of his skin. “Hey,” he says. “I mean. What. I wasn’t. You—I was worried.”

“Yeah, right,” says Aradia, cheerfully, and wanders off to hopefully to go put on some clothes. You clumsily hitch your towel up higher around your chest. 

Daevit has gone very small and hunchy again, and you think maybe you really like this kid. Like, really like him.

“I can go,” he says, still looking at his juice box. “Really. I’m okay on my own.”

“Sssthhsh,” you slur, “Ssht. Sth.” You give up and sit down next to him. Fuck going down all those stairs again. You think it over for a minute, working your stupid tongue against your fangs, then maneuver one of your hands to be kind of right by his knee. “Stay.”

“Cool,” he says, quietly, and puts down the juice box to take your hand. 

*

 _Say you mean it, seal it up_  
 _Say you want to try_  
 _Say you haven't had enough_  
 _Say you want to..._  
—Bombay Bicycle Club, _"Shuffle"_


End file.
